The Flea Palace

Description

By turns comic and tragic, The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice.

Shortlisted for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Elif Shafak’s The Flea Palace is a moving and highly original novel about a group of individuals who live in the same building and who together become embroiled in a mystery.

Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartment block in Istanbul. Now it is a sadly dilapidated home to ten wildly different individuals and their families.

There’s a womanizing, hard-drinking academic with a penchant for philosophy; a ‘clean freak’ and her lice-ridden daughter; a lapsed Jew in search of true love; and a charmingly naïve mistress whose shadowy past lurks in the building. When the rubbish at Bonbon Palace is stolen, a mysterious sequence of events unfolds that result in a soul-searching quest for truth.

Reviews

‘Picaresque’ – Guardian

‘Hyperactive and hilarious’ – Independent

Author Biography

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist whose work has been translated into 54 languages. The author of 19 books, 12 of which are novels, she is a bestselling author in many countries around the world. Shafak’s latest novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize; longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award; and chosen as Blackwell’s Book of the Year. Her previous novel, The Forty Rules of Love was chosen by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. In 2021, Shafak’s The Architect’s Apprentice was chosen for the Duchess of Cornwall’s inaugural book club, The Reading Room.